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Platonic Solids in Nature

Platonic solids, or regular convex polyhedra, are named after the Greek philosopher Plato who theorized that the five classical elements (Empedocles’ wind, water, fire, and earth, with an added element for spirit) were actually comprised of regular polyhedra. They are five in number and named for the number of faces they exhibit. They are the tetrahedron, the hexahedron, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron. Platonic solids have been the metaphysical and aesthetic inspiration of geometers for thousands of years. Johannes Kepler, a 17th century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologist, detailed a theory in which the relational distances between the planetary orbits is given by circumscribing the platonic solids within spheres. “In Mysterium Cosmographicum, published in 1596, Kepler laid out a model of the solar system in which the five solids were set inside one another and separated by a series of inscribed and circumscribed spheres. The six spheres each corresponded to one of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The solids were ordered with the innermost being the octahedron, followed by the icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, and finally the cube. In this way the structure of the solar system and the distance relationships between the planets was dictated by the Platonic solids. In the end, Kepler’s original idea had to be abandoned, but out of his research came the recognition that the orbits of planets are ellipses rather than circles, as well as his two laws of orbital dynamics, changing the courses of physics and astronomy, plus the discovery of the Kepler solids.”1

Plato wrote about these polyhedra in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and stabbing (like little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it. Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one’s hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny little balls. By contrast, a highly un-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents earth. These clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up, in stark difference to the smooth flow of water. Moreover, the solidity of the Earth was believed to be due to the fact that the cube is the only regular solid that tesselates Euclidean space. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarks, “…the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven”. Aristotle added a fifth element, aithêr (aether in Latin, “ether” in English) and postulated that the heavens were made of this element, but he had no interest in matching it with Plato’s fifth solid.

Platonic solids occur frequently in nature. Their forms are the complex crystalizations of minerals and appear as the skeletal remains of several species of amoebic sea creatures in the Radiolarian phylum. These creatures were beautifully illustrated by the Victorian-era biologist Ernst Haeckel in his Kunstformen der Nature, the famous plates of which are well worth viewing and can be done so here.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/platonic_solids

The Honeypot Has Burned to the Ground

For years, I have woken at night to the sensation of my feet burning. As if I were tied at the stake, my feet upon an emblazoned pyre. Narrator, the voice who simply narrates everything I do, will scream that “only saints and witches burn, and everyone knows which one you are.” He reminds me of some of the less moral things I’ve done in my life. Once, a long time ago, when I was five years old, another voice which sounded like a bell choir told me that I would die on the 11th of June, in the year 2025. Narrator says when the flames I feel at night reach my heart, I will die. The flames grow higher every time.

Nine days ago, I stayed at a house in Portland called Eridu. Other wizards live there, in fact, it’s one of the only houses I’ve ever encountered with a higher ratio of magical persons than non-magical. Nine days ago, I woke in the early hours of the morning to flames on the second story and smoke thick enough to slice with a steak knife. We ran downstairs and watched the house go up in flames. No candles had been left burning, though the fire department (who had, for some reason, taken 15 minutes to respond to the call) said that a candle was probably the cause of the fire.

My house burned to the ground this morning. The same fire department team fought the fire, even though The Honeypot was roughly ten miles from Eridu. Again, no candles, and they blamed a candle. When they recognized me and a friend who was staying over because they had lived at Eridu, I pointed out the strange coincidence of two connected houses burning down about a week from each other, both houses burning at the same exact time of day, and both having mysteriously unknown causes. I pointed out that it certainly looked like it wasn’t an accident, and I got ten seconds of the blankest stare I’ve ever seen on a human’s face.

Pictures after the cut.

(Continued)

My Chymical Wedding: Anarchy & The Occult

“For me, rebellion that is content only with political radicalism is missing a large part of the picture. Any true radicalism has to extend itself to the way that reality itself is constructed. Rebellion has to take itself all the way to the scheme of manifestation itself, to the writing on the walls of eternity. Anything else is missing the forest for the trees.” –Christian Sedman1

It is no wonder that anarchism has not yet had its revolution. Riddled with antiquarian notions of the externalized powers-that-be, the will to fight the police, the State, the politician obtained from a hundred-year-old rotten milkshake of Kropotkin, Goldman, and Proudhon, forever blinded by the ruse that the problem lies elsewhere, that the implement of control still lie outside the self. Well, the anarchists are at least one step ahead of the majority in their distrust of social hierarchies, that much I’ll give them. Yet regardless of my identification with their cause, I feel they have been brought via time machine from the epoch of the Industrial Revolution, brought here by some conniving arch-nemesis whose raison d’etre is to simply annoy me. True, this is better than dealing with the Medieval Aged consciousness of the standard drone of the corporatocratic system. (I hear some of them still believe in monotheism!)

I will no longer deal with the fusty reactionaries of age-old political theories. Anarchist theory was written in the late nineteenth century as a backlash to the early workings of capitalism. The capitalist dog has learned a new trick or three in the last hundred years; the anarchist hasn’t. Not only have the industrial technologies of the factories and laboratories progressed – the State too has developed new social technologies of control, ones that remain invisible, unseen, unfelt, lying submerged beneath our skins, viruses in our bloodstreams, cancers in the marrow of our bones. The postmodern State and its devices of control are now inside of us, in our thoughts, desires, and dreams. They create our self-identification and our perception of reality. They tell us how to feel, how to act, how to look. And what’s worse: they have learned to trick us into thinking that these things are our own. We’re individuals, you see. We’re all unique. We’re all different. We choose to be the way we are.

In order to destroy the State, we must first destroy its most grandiose masterpiece: ourselves. We must recognize that everything we have ever been told is a lie. This is where magic comes in. Enter MAGIC, stage left.

“No man is worthy to fight in the cause of freedom unless he has conquered his internal masters…He must conquer inordinate vanity and anger, self-deception, fear and inhibition. These are the crude ores of his being.” –John Whiteside Parsons

“The average structure of masses of people has been transformed into a distorted structure marked by impotence and fear of life…Man is helpless when he lacks knowledge; helplessness due to ignorance is the fertilizer of dictatorship.” –Wilhelm Reich

Magic, Anarchy, and Science seek the same end: freedom. James Curcio, in an article entitled “Living the Myth: Creating Value in a Cultural Void,” addresses two problems baring the way to the individual proponent of anarchy realizing the necessity of branching rebellion into realms other than the political. They identify these problems as a lack of determined creativity and stubbornly clinging to consensus reality, to the tangibility of everyday life.

Magic is that which is hidden from the senses. It is metaphysics; it is philosophy. The root question is the same, even if the tools differ: What is really going on here? A philosopher uses reason, a shaman may use hallucinogenic roots and drums, and a scientist may use a microscope. Historically, the roots of religion, science and magic are the same.

We can separate people into two ways of looking at the world – those who think that the outside world is “real,” and those who don’t. But as far as magic is concerned, it doesn’t matter if the world out there is “real.” Not even a little bit. Amusingly enough, it does matter that it doesn’t matter. The greatest tool used by the magician to ensure freedom is the fact that no matter what discoveries are made in science, psychology or the occult, no one can have the final word on truth.

This tool is called Doubt. There is no dogma, no grand theory and no overblown ego, that can stand up to this simple tool. With this tool you can avoid ever being taken advantage of by political or religious leaders, by advertisers or gurus: Each of us winds our own path through life, and there are no rules. Authority is an illusion, although hard work is not.2

It also matter whether you think Magic is real or not, because as soon as you start believing in it, it is. Try it for a while. It’s safe, I promise. The water’s fine, and if it heats up too fast you can always step back out, towel off, and go back to your safe haven of zines and consensus-run collective meetings. Be sure to give it an honest go though. Strange things will begin to happen.

Last week I was pulled from my seat on a light rail commuter train for lack for lack of a proper ticket. I would have tried to jump and run when I saw the traffic cop, or tried my other method of talking back to the voice who narrates all my actions, but alas! with my nose buried in the second edition of Relativity, Gravitation, and Cosmology, I am dully unaware of my surroundings, and what’s more, I no longer look the type to be arguing with a disembodied entity about whether or not I was slouching, which is my other tried-and-true method of escaping transit cops.

So I am taken off the train and asked for identification. I mutter that I don’t have any, and the “real” police are immediately radioed in. At this point, I have resigned myself to the depressing likelihood that I am going to jail for the evening or more, due to outstanding warrants, which, I might add, contribute more to the depressing element of it all, as they weren’t even issued for anything that spectacular. But they’re out there regardless – I’ve been notified of up here and there at previous residences. Well, at least I have a book that will last a while, I thought.

I zoned out for a couple seconds, staring at the officer’s handgun, while he ran my name. Unfortunately, my previously unconditional surrender had included my birth name. Then I remembered: I’m free. I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t harmed anyone. Perceptions are subjective, based upon the fallibility of the human senses, and therefore all of reality is subjective. This dream is a manifestation of my inner self; alchemically transmutating my self effects the outside world. If I only remember that I’m free, I can bend spacetime according to my will. So I transmutated, creating interference with the alchemical nature of the cops, effecting their decision-making abilities.

Strangely, impossibly, or might I say, magically, it worked. The cop taking down my information immediately re-postured his body, slinking away from me with an anxious glance before huddling over his notepad. And what’s more – he apparently could no longer see me properly, even though I was standing no more than two feet in front of him. “Short brown hair, brown eyes, 5’10”, 130 pounds?” “Yep.” Sure, I mean, if that’s what you what to write down, go for it. I’m not stopping you.

Then another strange thing happened. The cop entering my name into the computer in the squad car says, “Your name. It draws a blank.” I ask him what he means. “It’s blank. For the past three years. No record. You existed before that, but you don’t now. It’s as if someone erased you.” He looks at me, for the first time, somewhat accusingly, before mirroring the anxious expression on the other cops face.

This legitimately shocked me. A squirmy, terrified police officer who suddenly can’t see me properly is amusing, but computers losing information? I supposed it could happen often enough, and for all I knew I might have some altruistic benefactor, may Lucifer shine brightly on their path! out there hacking into and obliterating records nolens volens. But for the moment, it didn’t matter. My spells and hexes, charms and curses, had worked, and to continue working I had to knowing knowing that they always would.

The second officer handed me a ticket with a court date for community service, timidly stepping closer to mumble almost incoherently that if I didn’t show up and take care of it, “maybe somewhere, someday, sometime down the line…maybe three, maybe five years from now” that “something maybe might catch up” with me.

“So you’re telling me I don’t have to show up,” I suggested.

“I can’t say that.”

“Ah. Got it.” And then I turned to walk away.

Now, we could debate endlessly whether or not my magic powers, my rather extensive knowledge of ancient grimmoires, my research on alchemical manuscripts from Hermes Tristmegistus to Francis Bacon, or my sigil workings and practice of the Death Posture had anything to do with my not getting arrested. But that’s pointless, because the fact of the matter is, I didn’t get arrested. So it worked. And I see no need to question something that works. In all likelihood, the computer did not just poof! and lose files. Something else was happening. But whatever that something else was, it worked in accordance with my imagination, my will for the future, and so I enveloped it and made it my own, solve et coagula, mercurie and sulphur combined into the purest gold. So it doesn’t matter what you believe, magic is make-believe, and in that lies its power.

Human existence is a mystery, and all experience is conditioned by relative context. Even the question “is the world out there real?” is meaningless without an “I” to ask it. Realizing all of this, magicians take reality into their own hands because they realize that it is truly their reality.

Taking this step outside the herd, many would-be magicians immediately fall off a cliff, and never return. [“Madness comes rapidly to people who know that they are elves,” writes Simon Forrester.3] They fall into the group that think there is no “real world” out there. (Hit one of these people on the head with a brick and then ask them if it’s real.)

An experience I had a couple years ago may help illustrate this point. I was contacted by a woman who was waking up each morning covered in scratches. She asked me if I thought she was “actually” being attacked. The following joke from Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice seemed appropriate to relate:

There is the story of the American in the train who saw another American carrying a basket of unusual shape. His curiousity mastered him and he leant across and said: “Say, stranger, what you got in that bag?”

The other, lantern-jawed and taciturn, replied: “Mongoose.”

The first man was rather baffled, as he had never heard of a mongoose. After a pause he pursued, at the risk of a rebuff: “But say, what is a Mongoose?”

Mongoose eats snakes,” replied the other.

This was another poser, but he pursued: “What in hell do you want a mongoose for?”

Well, you see,” said the second man (in a confidential whisper), “my brother sees snakes.”

The first man was more puzzled than ever; but after a long think, he continued rather pathetically: “But say, them ain’t real snakes.”

Sure,” said the man with the basket, “but this Mongoose ain’t real either.”

She didn’t get the point of this story, and asked me again if I thought it was real. The only thing you can ask at this point is, do you think it is real? If so, you can pursue the problem through ritual. Hell, you might even get paid five hundred dollars to perform a ceremony. If you decide to look at it as not real, i.e. internal rather than external, it can be pursued through psychotherapy. Either is true. Neither is true.

Magic is a philosophy. It is a way of looking at life. Even man’s ideas of God are just that – ideas.

So let’s plumb Crowley’s word “Magick” further. Aleister Crowley defined Magick as the “science and art of causing change in conformity with Will.” Straightforward enough, except for that tricky word, “Will.”

Will is synonymous with Identity – that which one is. [note: I would argue that Will is closer to ipseity, which La prise de la Concorde dictionary defines as “the differential quality of an individual who is irreplaceable and incomparable, which is itself (ipse) and not another. Ipseity...likewise implies an identity to one's self as conservation of this individual differential beyond the changes that affect[sic] it.” In contrast with haecceity, which allows us to define the individual members of the set of chairs as “chairs,” even though some may have three legs, some four, and some may be made of metal or plastic while others are tree stumps, ipseity allows us to identify a specific chair and tell it apart from every other in the subset of Things-To-Sit-On called “chairs.”] However, it is that Identity inflected outward as action. One is what one does. And if one’s doing is equivalent with one’s being, then one is practicing magic.

As this all boils down to identity, magic is in many ways a method for performing psychotherapy on oneself. Congruence between one’s identity and one’s action, even one’s vocation, are essential to be-what-one-is…

The magician desires freedom. The first tool towards this, as previously mentioned, is Doubt; the second is Choice. To make wise decisions, based on one’s goals rather than social convention or expectation, one must know oneself and be willing to die for the right to make that Choice…

The meaning we give to experiences and sensations, even something as simple as a color, is in our hands. For most, this process is primarily automatic, unconscious. However, at some point, and on some level, we have to choose to allow meanings to be given. It is through choosing to accept predetermined meanings that we opt into cultures.

Culture comes about, in part through an agreement on certain terms. [“Wenn ich Kultur hören, entsichere ich meinem Browning”! When I hear the word “culture,” I reach for my Browning.] If a group all choose to give x meaning to object y, they are then entering the same domain together…It is this association of meaning, this “naming” of things, which is the root of our ability to build worlds.

The power of this ability must not be understated. Again, the simple choice to consider the base biological drives a hindrance to spiritual life, rather than the path to it, set the predominant historic trend for two millenia of Western history.

It is this ability to choose to create and give meaning, to reconstruct the coal of our experience and turn it into diamonds, for those who have the subtlety to recognize them, which differentiates a magician. This capacity exists within us all…Of course, the traditional magician uses a wand, has a altar, performs invocations, probably practices yoga, uses sexual secretions for magical purposes, defiles virgins, etc. However, all of these “tools of the trade” are symbolic, first and foremost.

The symbolic power of ritual tools is another key of magical practice, which can be analyzed in terms of structuralist and post-structuralist theories on linguistics and anthropology. We construct our reality through mental images and words that we use to represent things in our experience. The references become bounded to that which they refer…So for the time being put aside the useless question of whether magic, energy, and spirits are or are not “real,” and recognize that what we are working with is our ability to name things, to give them meaning.4

The textbook anarchist and manifesto revolutionary Doubts the morality of hierarchic systems. The next step must be taken. The anarchist magi, justified and bolstered by these Doubts of whether or not these systems should have power in the first place, Chooses to believe that that power is non-existent, effectively stripping them of it. Magic is real just as Anarchy is real, simply because it is my Will. So for all you who seek the elimination of the social injustice that is called the State: take up your jeweled wands and flying broomsticks! And to you, who hide your magic away as a petty weekend hobby: take up your black balaklavas and molotovs!

1 Sedman, Christian. “They Only Want You When You’re Seventeen, When You’re Twenty-One, You’re No Fun”. Generation Hex. Louv, Jason ed. Disinformation Press. New York: 2006.

2 Curcio, Jame. “Living the Myth: Creating Value in a Cultural Void.” ibid. p.123.

3 Forrester, Simon. “Opening and Closing the Psychedelic Temple”. ibid. p. 196.

4 see note 2

Where I Am From, and Where I Am Going

Yet another reason for my belief that I will one day play a part in the practical invention of a time travel device:

Today, while walking, I decided on whim to take an obnoxious pedestrian bridge that I have never taken before, simply because it spans about two hundred feet, has two spirals, is approximately fifty feet high, all to cross one lane of traffic. At the summit of the bridge, between two pillars, a Ranier Maria Rilke book was hidden. When I picked it up, I found a page marked. I turned to it. Underlined was the quote: “…the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens…” Underneath this was written: Oh! you who travel the currents of time, this future seeks its child returned!

I feel like I’m being watched on so many different levels.

On a lighter note, there is a new Elk Information Radio Station song, called “This Is The Solution: To Be Happy With Slaughter” (after the David Ignatow poem of the same title), in the Sound section.

Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Conference 2010

I will be speaking tomorrow on the psychological conditioning and subjugation of individuals by the postmodern capitalist system and potential methods for the anti-authoritarian individual to use specific altered states of consciousness toward psychological de-programming, the relation of socio-cultural paradigms and scientific paradigms and potential future societies, and the linearization of thought and dichotomization of categorical rationality and novel models for subjectivity based on quantum and chaos theories at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Conference at UC Berkeley at 3:15 PM. The schedule of speakers and workshops can be found here.

“i am anarchy”: Poetic, Apocalyptic Cockroach’s Intended Use of Quantum Mechanics Toward The Eschaton

My dear friend, Magpie Killjoy, took off traveling again after staying with at the Honeypot Collective for a few weeks, and they cleaned out their van/house, Comrade Dead Starling, before leaving, giving me on quasi-loan an entire library of books and zines. One of the ones they would not let me take was the lives and times of archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis.

From the Wikipedia entry on Archy and Mehitabel:

Archy and Mehitabel (styled as archy and mehitabel) is the title of a series of newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Written as fictional social commentary and intended as a space-filler to allow Marquis to meet the challenge of writing a daily newspaper column six days a week, archy and mehitabel is Marquis’ most famous work. Collections of these stories are still sold in print today. The published editions of these stories were originally illustrated by George Herriman, the creator and illustrator of Krazy Kat.

In 1916, Marquis introduced a fictional cockroach named “Archy” into his daily newspaper column at The New York Evening Sun. Archy (whose name was always written in lower case in the book titles, but was upper case when Marquis would write about him in narrative form) was a cockroach who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy’s best friend was an alley cat named “Mehitabel,” and the two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.

Because he was a cockroach, Archy was unable to operate the shift key on the typewriter (he jumped on each key to type; since using shift requires two keys to be pressed simultaneously, he physically could not use capitals), and so all of his verse was written without capitalization or punctuation. (Writing in his own persona, though, Marquis always used correct capitalization and punctuation. As E. B. White wrote in his introduction to “The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel,” it would be incorrect to conclude that, “because Don Marquis’s cockroach was incapable of operating the shift key of a typewriter, nobody else could operate it.”)

There was at least one point in which Archy happened to jump onto the shift lock key—a chapter titled Capitals at Last (styled as CAPITALS AT LAST).

I scribbled a poem, about anarchist insects who will use quantum mechanics to destroy the world, from the book before Magpie repacked it into Comrade Dead Starling:

Attack of the Amoeboids, Etching by Isis

where have i been so long

you ask me

i have been going up

and down like the devil

seeking what i might devour

i am hungry always hungry

and in the end i shall

eat everything

all the world shall come at

last to the multitudinous maws

of insects

a civilization perishes

before the tireless teeth

of little little germs

ha ha i have thrown off the mask

at last

you thought i was only

an archy

but i am more than that

i am anarchy

where have i been you ask

i have been organizing the insects

the ants the worms the wasps

the bees the cockroaches

the mosquitos

for a revolt against mankind

i have declared war

upon humanity

i even i shall fling

the mighty atom

that splits a planet asunder

i ride the microbe that crashes down olympus

where have i been you ask me where

i am jove and from my seat

on the edge of a bowl of beef stew

i launch the thunderous

molecule

that smites a cosmos into bits

where have i been you ask

but you had better ask

who follows in my train

there is an ant

a desert ant a tamerlane

who ate a pyramid in rage

that he might get at and devour

the mummies of six hundred

kings who in remote

antiquity had stepped upon

and crushed ascendants of his

my myrmidons

are trivial things

and they have always ruled the world

and now they shall strike down mankind

i shall show you how

a solar system

pivots on the nubbin

of a flageolet bean

i shall show you how a blood clot

moving in a despots brain

flung a hundred million men

to death and disease

and plunged a planet into woe

for twice a hundred years

we have the key to the forth dimension

for we know the little things that swim and swarm

in protoplasm

i can show you love and hate

and the future

dreaming side by side

in a cell

in the little cells where

matter is so fine it merges

into spirit

you ask me where have i been

but you had better

ask me where i am

and what

i have been drinking

exclamation point

archy

What Comes After Anarchism?

“A Witch is a Rebel in Physics.” –Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica, 1650

Not black, not white, but “off-white” magic, to use Carroll’s term. “You do not have to sell your soul to succeed with off-white magic. You merely have to recognize the existence of your other seven.”1 Hakim Bey pondered in his “Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality” what the socio-cultural paradigm would look like when it finally catches up with the scientific paradigm of quantum theory:

Quantum mechanics, considered as the source of such a paradigm, at first seems to lack any social ramifications or parallels, almost as if its very weirdness deprives it of all connections with ‘everyday’ life or social reality…my groping attempt at a synthesis is suggested by what I call Chaos Theory, which hold to the axiom that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy. ‘The one gave birth to the two, the two to the 10,000 things’ – but all this is the tao & nothing but the tao. Yin & Yang have no being in themselves, but act as interpenetrating modalities of the tao. The real/unreal dichotomy enslaves us in false consciousness. Looked at from one point of view, nothing is real; from another point of view, everything is real; from another, ‘nothing is real except the Real’; from yet another, ‘I am the Real’ (ana’I Haqq, a Sufi ‘koan’). These semantricks create a set of paradoxes – and the resolution will give us an essentially metalinguistic certainty of being’s oneness. Such oneness cannot be structured or defined in any way. It has no ‘ruler’ and no ‘laws’ – hence, ontological anarchy.2

If Quantum Theory is approaching Chaos Theory, and “off-white” magic is approaching Chaos Magic, then what is post-anarchism in the political realm? In other words, if today our revolutionaries are anarchists, then will the revolutionaries of the realized anarchist society be chaotes? Would the next political paradigm after Anarchism be Chaos? And what would revolutionaries look like at this point? (Continued)

Alchemical Bust Card

Call For An Enochian Decryption of An Alien Encyclopaedia

On Reading Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus

Title Page

Luigi Seraphini, Italian artist and architect, created Codex Seraphinianus1 over the course of thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. Approximately 360 pages in length, the book is a fantastical pictorial encyclopedia of an alien world, completely handwritten in one of the cryptic languages of the bizarrely depicted planet. Grey Lodge Occult Review hosts a torrent of the Codex. The writing system appears to be modeled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right inscription; uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals) but is much more curvilinear, “not unlike cursive Georgian in appearance. Some letters appear only at the beginning or at the end of words, a feature shared with Semitic writing systems. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been cracked (apparently independently) by Allan C. Wechsler and Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski, among others. It is a variation of base 21. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on May 8th 2009, Serafini has stated that the script of the Codex is asemic, that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the ‘reader’ is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.”2 3 The writing system itself has defied decryption, and statistical cryptological analysis reveals glyph combinations which do not naturally occur in any known language. The only documented language which also contains “unnatural” combinations of sounds is Enochian, the magical “language of the angels” transcribed (or if you’re more cynically inclined, invented) by the 17th century personal alchemist and sorcerer to Queen Elizabeth I of England, Dr. John Dee. In my research on the Codex Seraphinianus, I encountered several attempted decryptions of the text, none of which attempted to compare a statistical analysis with Enochian. Unless one was fluent in Enochian (my skills only include minor translations of spells and invocations), use of a computer program equipped with an Enochian dictionary would be advisable. I will leave this project to someone with more cryptological expertise and time than myself. (Continued)

Esoteric Sexual Symbology of Feral Children

In the case of Victor of Aveyron, in 1800, Rousseau’s hypothetical conjectures on man in a state of nature dominated preconceptions in the minds of doctors and scientists, clouding their ability to objectively scrutinize Victor’s wild upbringing. Victor, captured and escaped twice before his final captivity began in 1800, was found running naked and foraging in the forests surrounding the French town of Aveyron. Wild children such as he were badly documented and worse understood, and remain so even to this day. They were “classed as a separate species of human being by Linnaeus, [and as such] homo sapiens ferus represented a tantalizing and uncanny blurring of the conceptual lines separating man and beast.”1 Linnaeus documented nine cases in his 1788 edition of Systema naturae; only the cases of Peter of Hanover and “the wild girl of Champagne” had enough factual information to become distinguishable from the folklore surrounding the other cases.2 Victor of Aveyron is the first heavily documented study of a feral child by practitioners of the Western sciences.

Yousef argues in “Savage or Solitary?” that Victor’s speechlessness may not be a result of living in the wild for so many years, but either as a result of “the horizontal scar across the boy’s throat, measuring some 41 millimeters in length, [which] could only have been caused by a knife” or even hypothetically as a result of autism.3 Certainly, if viewed in a certain light, Victor’s case completely obliterates Rousseau’s state of nature theory, rather than supporting it. Taking Victor’s case into account, we must also not forget that the scar across his throat symbolizes an abandonment, a childhood trauma whose negative ramifications remain inseparable from those derived from a maintained primitive existence.

Rousseau’s man in the idyllic state of nature was, and is still, romanticized by adherents of anti-civilization and primitivist theories, including the naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey, who examined Victor of Aveyron upon the latter’s arrival at Paris, and who lamented “the boy’s passage from his natural, animal independence to a social world that will both humanize him and bind him in chains of dependence,” saying:

Go forth, poor youth, on this unhappy earth, go forth and lose in your relations with men your primitiveness and simplicity! You lived in the bosom of ancient forests; you found your nourishment at the foot of oaks and beech trees; you quenched your thirst at crystal springs; content with your meager destiny, limited by your simple desires, satisfied with your way of life beyond which you knew nothing…4 (Continued)